A Photo in the Hand is worth a thousand in the Hard Drive

I have recently rediscovered the joy of the printed photo; the excitement of returning home to find a pack of prints on the doormat. It's just like the old days before digital photography, but with one important difference. Each image is a perfectly crafted work of art; carefully selected from among dozens of its peers; lovingly straightened, cropped and tuned. The end result is infinitely more satisfying than an image on a screen could ever be.

The Devil's Garden, Arches NP, Utah, April 2010. Of the thousands of pictures I took over three weeks in Utah this is my favourite. The essence of desert is here, its beauty lying in the sparsity of the vegetation, each plant and each rock perfectly placed, as in a zen garden.

I was awed by the vivid red rocks of the Colorado Plateau, but the Americans I spoke to invariably mentioned the otherworldly greenness of Scotland, which they cited as one of the main reasons that they wanted to visit. There isn't much green in this view of the snow peaks of the Arrochar Alps,  taken from the shore of a frozen Loch Fyne on January 7th.